Wordpress to HubSpot CMS - I had major crawl issues post launch and now traffic is down 400%

[Charlene-Wingfield]

Hi there good looking person! Our traffic went from 12k visitors in july to 3k visitors in july. <<  www.thedsmgroup.com  >>When we moved our site from wordpress to the hubspot COS (their CMS system), I didnt submit a new sitemap to google webmaster tools. I didn't know that I had to... and to be honest, I've never submitted or re-submitted a sitemap to GWT. I have always built clean sites with fresh content and good internal linking and never worried about it.  Yoast kind of took care of the rest, as all of my sites and our clients' sites were always on wordpress. Well, lesson learned.  I got this message on June 27th in GWT_http://www.thedsmgroup.com/: Increase in not found errors__Google detected a significant increase in the number of URLs that return a 404 (Page Not Found) error. Investigating these errors and fixing them where appropriate ensures that Google can successfully crawl your site's pages._One month after our site launched we had 1,000 404s on our website. Ouch. Google  thought we had a 1,200 page website with only 200 good pages and 1,000 error pages. Not very trust worthy... We never had a 404 ever before this, as we added a plugin to wordpress that would 301 any 404 to the homepage, so we never had a broken link on our site, which is not ideal for UX, but as far as google was concerned, our site was always clean. Obviously I have submitted a new sitemap to GWT a few weeks ago, and we are moving in the right direction... **but have I taken care of everything I need to? I'm not sure.  Our traffic is still around 100 visitors per day, not 400 per day as it was before we launched the new site.**Thoughts?I'm not totally freaking out or anything, but a month ago we ranked #1 and #2 for "marketing agency nj", now we aren't in the top 100.  I've never had a problem like this. _I added a few screen grabs from Google Webmaster Tools that should be helpful.__Bottom line, have I done everything I need to or do I need to do something with all of these "not found" error details that I have in GWT?_None of these "not found" pages have any value and I'm not sure how Google even found them... For example:  http://www.thedsmgroup.com/supersize-page-test/screen-shot-2012-11-06-at-2-33-22-pmHelp! -JasonuhLLtou&h4QmGCW#0 uhLLtou&h4QmGCW#1

[Paddy_Moogan]

Hi Jason,

It sounds like when you moved to the Hubspot CMS, the URLs of your website changed? If so, 301 redirects are needed from the old URLs to the new ones. Unfortunately, redirecting all of your pages to the homepage is not optimal and is the likely cause of the traffic still remaining very low on your website.

It has been some time now since this work was done but I think it's worth a shot removing the 301 redirect from all your old pages to the home page. Then you should 301 redirect every individual old URL to the most appropriate new URL. This makes for a much better user experience, it stops 404 errors and it helps maintain traffic.

I'm honestly not sure if it's too late to fix the traffic, but it is worth a shot I think.

For future guidance, here are some good guides on moving your website:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6033049?hl=en&ref_topic=6033084

http://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos

I hope that helps!

Paddy

[cmortensen]

Wondering if this ever got resolved? I have a few clients on Hubspot as well and we are concerned that since the blog lives on a subdomain (blog.website.com) we are concerned that the core site is not getting the SEO credit it deserves. We have had to submit the blog sitemap to GWT separately just as you would a www. version of the site. When asking Hubspot about this they were not able to really answer since it's more of a Google/SEO question.

Thanks in advance... still on the hunt to find out more!